Britain continues its de-evolution from a serious country to one of increasing absurdity by cranking out yet one more irrelevant report advocating another thread of societal control.
The report, commissioned by the Prime Minister and written by a clinical psychologist and "television parenting guru," urges the imposition of cautionary labelling for video games "like health warnings on cigarettes." Prompted by the "moral panic" engendered by video games, the paper concludes that video games may harm the development of children’s beliefs and value systems. Proposed fines for selling age-inappropriate games would include hefty fines and even jail time.
That the United Kingdom is suffering a severe case of moral panic is no surprise. The state, by imposing smoking bans at the behest of bug-eyed prohibitionists and the multi-national pharmaceutical industry, is purposely driving thousands of pubs and restaurants out of business. Its goal of saturating the country with television monitoring devices makes the country the most spied-upon nation on Earth. As its medical system tanks people are unconscionably being denied life-saving intervention as moralistic punishment for making the wrong life-style choices, such as smoking, drinking, and overeating. The populace is anxious yet abnormally passive as individual rights disappear while the state grows ever more intrusive.
Britain, like many other "advanced" countries, already has a system in place that classifies violent or sexually explicit video games as off-limits for minors. The clinical psychologist and guru/poobah says, however, that the current system is not tough enough, noting that currently only two percent of videos sold carry the adult-only label. She wants a multitude of age level designations so that a 12-year-old would be forbidden from buying one rated for 14-year-olds. Such micro-monitoring would obviously provide an unlimited vista of vendor violations, which is perfect for a culture that appears to want a nation of citizens who cannot help but break one or several regulations each and every day. A nation of lawbreakers is one where the authorities hold a club over everyone’s head. It is always easier to control the guilty rather than the innocent.
By granting a haughty television parenting guru the essential power to create new laws that apply to sixty-plus million inhabitants, the United Kingdom degenerates further as a nation where a tiny elite exercise massive power over an increasingly feckless citizenry. As with the smoking ban, which was promoted by a handful of anti-tobacco zealots who hate smokers and by the drug industry that wants to sell its expensive smoking cessation quackery to smokers forbidden to light up, constructing another level of bureaucracy and enforcement to deal with the so-called problem of video games enriches a few politically-wired factions at the expense of the majority.
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